Search engines are used for searching for information over the World Wide Web. Search engines are also utilized to search locally over the user device. A search query refers to a query that a user enters into such a search engine in order to receive search results. The search query may be in a form of a textual query, an image, or an audio query.
Searching for multimedia content elements (e.g., picture, video clips, audio clips, etc.) stored locally on the user device as well as on the web may not be an easy task. According to the prior art solutions, respective of an input query a search is performed through the metadata of the available multimedia content elements. The metadata is typically associated with a multimedia content element and includes parameters, such as the element's size, type, name, and short description, and so on. The description and name of the element are typically provided by the creator of the element and by a person saving or placing the element in a local device and/or a website. Therefore, metadata of an element, in most cases, is not sufficiently descriptive of the multimedia element. For example, a user may save a picture of a cat under the file name of “weekend fun”, thus the metadata would not be descriptive of the contents of the picture.
As a result, searching for multimedia content elements based solely on their metadata may not provide the most accurate results. Following the above example, the input query ‘cat’ would not return the picture saved under “weekend fun”. In computer science, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information, such as multimedia content elements.
Tagging has gained wide popularity due to the growth of social networking, photograph sharing, and bookmarking of websites. Some websites allow users to create and manage tags that categorize content using simple keywords. The users of such sites manually add and define the description of the tags. However, some websites limit the tagging options of multimedia elements, for example, by only allowing tagging of people shown in a picture. Therefore, searching for all multimedia content elements solely based on the tags would not be efficient.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a solution that overcomes the deficiencies of the prior art by providing search results respective of the contents of the multimedia elements. It should be further advantageous to provide a solution for automatically tagging multimedia elements based on their contents.